When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Sometimes they’ll include recommendations for other related newsletters or services we offer. OurPrivacy Noticeexplains more about how we use your data, and your rights. You can unsubscribe at any time.

McDermott fulfilled a lifetime ambition when he was named manager of Reading. Jonny spoke to him last week to see what makes the new man tick.

He talks candidly about overcoming the early disappointments in his career and his time with the big boys at Arsenal and about his progress into management.

You would think he pinches himself every day still, but new Reading manager Brian McDermott is a great deal more pragmatic than that.

McDermott knows how swiftly fortunes can change in football, having been released by Queens Park Rangers as a 15-year-old trainee back in 1977.

At such a tender and impressionable age, that cold-faced rejection could have finished off the most resolute of characters. Not this one though.

“It was a bad age for that to happen,” said the 48-year-old who has now occupied pretty much all of the backroom staff posts at Madejski Stadium in the last 10 years.

“Getting released never really knocked my confidence. I was always sure that I wanted to play football for a living and I thought QPR were wrong.”

Sitting in an executive box in Madejski Stadium’s West Stand, McDermott tells the ironic story of how he came full circle after being let down by one team who play in blue and white hoops, to now becoming in charge of another.

He was never going to let the ultimate dream slip away.

“I kept going and was spotted by Arsenal playing for Slough Schools and they gave me a trial. I got an apprenticeship at 16 by the skin of my teeth. I signed pro at 17 and made my debut that season as well.”

Wide-man McDermott made 72 appearances for the Gunners, scoring 13 goals for them.

He was rewarded with his Arsenal debut against Bristol City, the team he first faced as Royals manager in a 1-1 draw in December.

But despite showing promise and flair, the man from Berkshire never really got going under Terry Neill.

“I was in and out of the team at Arsenal. I left there when I was and probably stayed there a bit too long in the end.

“I had loan moves at Fulham and IFK Norrköping in Sweden to get games, but as a youngster at Highbury, I never got the amount of games that I should have done.

“Knowing what I know now, I would have played a lot more games. I’m a lot older and wiser now from everything that happened back then.”

McDermott isn’t bitter about his time at Arsenal. He was playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world with the legendary Frank Stapleton and Alan Sunderland up front.

He was living the dream and enjoying the parties of a footballer in the late 1970s.

“There was a lot of that going on, but it was different then. We were encouraged to go out and have parties as a squad. Of course there was alcohol involved in it all.

“There was a culture and that wasn’t just at Arsenal. It was everywhere. Everybody was on the same wavelength.

“When I first started playing professionally our pre-match meal was fillet steak, a pint of milk and a bar of chocolate. That’s no exaggeration and this was at one of the best clubs in the world.

“I was running around with a brick in my stomach, but we didn’t know any better. You look at it now and it’s all changed and for the better.”

There was an entire world of change on the horizon for McDermott when he moved to Sweden in 1984, a nation he still holds close to his heart.

“It was funny when I went over there,” recalls McDermott.

“After my first training sessions the guys were all stretching in the showers and I asked them what they were doing and they said it was a warm down. We’d never done that at Arsenal.

“It was good for me at the time to get away and I had a really good time there.

“I’ve got a lot of time for that place, I was given the player of the year award too and it was a great experience.

“When I got there I said ‘Don’t speak English to me’, but they all wanted to practise English so in the end we didn’t really get anywhere.”

It wasn’t until he returned to England that McDermott really started to benefit from others in the game and absorb the traits that help to make up his managerial virtues today.

“The main influences came later in my career, it was people like Frank Burrows at Cardiff City and Terry Cooper at Exeter City. I was just taught really good things about how to win games.

“I played in teams that won championships, like Oxford where I was with Maurice Evans and Jim Smith.

“When I was at Arsenal I was just playing and I had no team concept. That was me personally.

“I was just looking to get a game week-in week-out and try the best I could all the time. As a young player it was very hard and I appreciate the young lads we’ve got here because of that and you try to teach them early what it’s all about from my own experiences.”

Time off is a rare commodity for football managers, but McDermott likes to make the most of it by playing golf with friends for five days every June and also by jamming on his guitar.

And he admits that nowadays he doesn’t find it hard to switch off when he drives away from the training ground or after a game.

“I suppose it’s because I’m a lot more experienced now that I can do that,” he said.

“When I first got a manager’s job I did find it hard. But now I look at things in the moment.

“I used to look too far ahead and reflect on things too much and it didn’t help, so I found it difficult to switch off.

“I have a lot of friends who are Irish and anytime there’s a bit of a party the guitars come out. It’s just a bit of fun really.

“I won’t be playing it in the dressing room or anything like that, though. I’ll leave that all to Shane Long who is pretty decent at it himself and has done it before.

“But I have played in front of the staff in Korea during the Peace Cup when Steve Coppell was here and also one year out in Sweden during pre-season.

“There was some bloke in the hotel bar with a guitar and I went over, took it off him and started playing. He wasn’t happy though!”

For now though, McDermott is just concentrating on hitting the right notes for Royals and getting his team singing off the same hymn sheet. A task which he already looks to be more than capable of.